The present invention relates generally to file retention in a software testing system, and more specifically, to ideal age vector based file retention in a software testing system.
Software may be extensively tested before being released as a software product. In a software testing environment, new versions of software under test are regularly provided to the testers as developers make changes to the software. The new versions may be provided at any appropriate interval, for example, daily. Each new version may take the form of a relatively large file. It is useful to retain historical version files of software under test because after a bug (or error) has been discovered in the software, the historical version files of the software may be used to determine when the bug was introduced into the software. Knowledge of when the bug was introduced may allow identification of the cause of the bug and reduce the necessary debugging effort to correct the bug. Retention of a relatively large number of historical version files may be necessary to pinpoint when bugs were introduced into software.